Shemmy's Planescape Storyhour #2 (Updated x3 10-17-07)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Shemeska
Adventurer
Invisible by virtue of Velkyn’s wand of invisibility the group stepped into the dark of the room as the chains softly clattered in the cold, breath-like wind. Ankita summoned a globe of light to illuminate the room to a few more yards away from where they stood, but no end was in sight, only the rippling chains like twisted trees in a metallic jungle.
Inva stepped back from the conjured light and held up a copper coin between two fingers. “Let’s see how deep this room is…”
The tanar’ri-blooded tiefer tossed the coin and mentally counted out the seconds before she heard it strike a solid wall on the other side. Several hundred feet deep at the very least, but at least it was dark and that suited her just fine.
“What the hell are those?” Velkyn said as he squinted and shifted his sight into the darkvision spectrum.
Tangled within or hanging in the masses of chains were a trio of forms. Two of them were obviously corpses of humans, but the third was so encased in the chains that it was less certain as to any firm details.
Victor fingered his holy symbol as the third corpse twitched slightly beyond the rattling of the chains in the wind.
Ankita smiled and gestured her hand towards the chains that ensconced the figure and several seconds later they began to give off palpable warmth. The figure twitched more.
“What’d you do?” Marcus asked curiously as his brother continued to keep his holy symbol ready.
Ankita smiled and pointed at the twitching figure, “Just a spell to heat metal. Doesn’t last long but I can do it as many times as I want as long as I’m awake.”
As if to punctuate her statement the chains around the wrapped form flared up and began to glow like red-hot irons in a forge and the reaction was immediate. The being gave an infuriated snarl and swung itself backwards and away from the rapidly warming nest of hanging chains. The chains around its body seemed to latch onto those hanging behind it and swing it away like extensions of itself.
“Yeah, that would be a kyton. Lovely.” Inva said from where she stood at the dim margin of Ankita’s summoned light.
“Alright, what are Kytons vulnerable to?” Marcus asked.
Ankita answered, “They’re not resistant to much of anything, but they heal wounds unless the weapons are enchanted to at least a certain degree.”
Marcus and his cohort raised their weapons, joined soon by Victor’s vassal Garibaldi.
“Won’t be much of a problem I assure you.” Victor’s brother said as he raised a saber in one hand and a pistol in the other.
With the fighters in the front followed closely behind by the cleric and with the casters standing at the rear they tentatively advanced into the darkness. Somewhere beyond the range of their light they could hear the slink and rattle of chains moving independently from the soft sway imparted by the breeze.
As they passed the two dangling corpses they noticed another hanging corpse and a glimmer of movement at the edge of the light.
“There’s more than one thing moving back there. Probably two kytons instead of one.” Victor said.
Then the two kytons came rushing out of the darkness and at the same time the other corpses lurched into activity with pinpoints of reddish light suddenly erupting in their unliving sockets.
“Gaaaahh!” Velkyn shouted as one of the wights struck him a heavy blow on the shoulder, a sense of chilling cold pervaded the wound, and several of his more powerful spells drained from his memory like dreams that slipped away upon waking.
“Take the fiends!” Victor shouted as he turned to the undead threatening the spellcasters.
The two chain wrapped fiends swung into the light and lashed out at Marcus, Francesca and Garibaldi. They scored a few glancing blows but the fighters were heavily enough armored to ward off most of the damage.
Velkyn rolled away from immediate danger and hurriedly cast a spell to batter one of the wights with a trio of unerringly accurate magical bolts. A second later the same creature was burnt to a crisp by a glowing beam of light from Victor’s outstretched hand.
The fighters were having difficulty with the kytons, as it seemed to be that more than half of their blows that connected with the devils were simply negated by the beings’ innate resistance to damaging blows. They scored cuts and slashes on them but most of the damage simply sealed itself up in mere moments.
Another wight came shambling out of the darkness and Victor decided to end their threat as soon as possible. The cleric brandished his holy symbol and shouted out an invocation to his deity at the top of his lungs. A brilliant halo of sunlight surrounded him and enveloped the two snarling wights, leaving behind naught but ashes.
Free from the risk of the undead, Ankita whispered an incantation and summoned a rolling sphere of flame onto one of the fiends as Marcus cocked his pistol and aimed it for the head of the other. The sphere missed its target, but a hellish shriek of pain that rose over the loud and sudden crack of the pistol made it clear even before the smoke cleared that Marcus hadn’t missed his target.
Several more flurries of blows from the fighters and Inva’s sword suddenly bursting from the throat of one of the two kytons and the fight was over. The bodies of the fiends began to slowly burn into piles of chains and foul-smelling ashes and there was little left of the undead as it was.
Velkyn winced at the lingering chill that had crept into his bones from the earlier attack as he looked over towards Victor and then down at the smoldering remains of the wights. “What god did you say you worshipped?”
“The right god!” Victor said with a triumphant smile and a single eyebrow raised.
Velkyn and Ankita chuckled.
“Whatever…” Inva said to herself as once again she slunk off into the shadows with a grin.
A brief survey of the remains turned up little besides a scattering of gold and silver coins; not much but a minimal reward for their troubles they all figured, even if it didn’t really bring them any closer to escape or even an explanation of what had brought them to their present circumstance. Inva retrieved her bent copper piece that she’d tossed across the room earlier and then cautiously glanced down the passageway that led out of the room.
“Seems clear to me. Looks like it runs about forty feet and hits another room.” Velkyn said, more for Francesca, Garibaldi, and Ankita’s benefit than not since they, as humans, had neither the darkvision of the half-drow and the tieflings, or the low light vision of the elf. Of course, Ankita was anything but, and had better vision in the dark than any of them save perhaps Inva who seemed to thrive in the shadows like she was a part of them. But, no need to tell the others anything more than they knew unless it was needed; it might not be taken well.
The room was made of the same rough metal as everything else, though the floor was polished by repeated foot traffic more than before. Three metal doors blocked exit from the chamber and a solid metal column stood provocatively in the center. Almost unnoticed till they had entered the room were a number of small piles of rocks and gravel.
“Hold on…” Ankita said as she noticed the gravel.
Inva slipped out of the shadows at the warning and whispered a few words under her breath just as Ankita did the same.
They glanced warily at the metal column that stood from floor to ceiling in the very center of the room. It was pentagonal in shape and unadorned except for two short levers that graced identical slots on each of the five faces. A soft mechanical whirring emanated from its interior, and as they listened to it they could hear a regular pattern to it, but it gave little clue regarding the ten levers.
“Three doors and ten levers. This isn’t going to be pleasant if anything so far has been an indication. There’s today’s lesson in the obvious.” Velkyn said sarcastically as he examined the base of the column.
Marcus and his cohort were both busily checking the three doors that led out of the room, but outside of a bit of rust on each of them they could discern little. The doors were thick enough to prevent any determination of how deep their other sides might be, either room, wall, or passage.
Inva was kneeling on the floor, tapping a claw upon a thin stain on the ground. She twitched her tail and traced up the column to where the spray of liquid that caused the stain would have originated. Sure enough she found a small, almost undetectable pinhole in the metal surface. Another circuit around the column and she was certain that none of the other faces had such a feature.
The tiefling tapped the face of the column with the spade at the tip of her tail. The others turned at the hollow clang.
“One of the two levers here spits out some sort of liquid, either a trap or a water source. I can’t tell from the stain on the floor which it might be. Anyone care to find out?”
Victor held out an empty glass vial, the remnants of a quaffed healing potion from the fight earlier. “At the least we can trap some of it here and then make a decision.”
“Fair enough.” Inva said as Victor took the vial and held it over the pinhole.
A second later as the others braced themselves Velkyn pulled one of the levers and a stream of colorless liquid filled the vial.
“It’s… it’s a healing potion of some sort.” Victor said as he sniffed at the liquid.
“There’s an irony. I was expecting acid.” Ankita said.
They pulled the lever a second time, using another empty vial, but the second time the amount of liquid was only half what it was the first time. They shrugged and passed it off as perhaps some internal reservoir needing time to refill. And so, not wishing to tempt fate on a third try with the same lever, they picked another at random.
Marcus was about to pull another lever before Velkyn stopped him.
“Wait a second. If anything is behind those doors when they open, why don’t we all stay invisible? I’ve got enough charges on the wand, at least for the moment.” The half-drow said as he held up the wand. “Not cheap, but it’s better than being dead.”
“Work’s for me, and I can pull the lever without being close to it: Telekinesis.” Ankita said as Velkyn tapped her with the wand.
And so with all of them invisible, Ankita reached out with a tug of invisible force and pulled another of the levers.
There was a sudden brimstone smell that flooded the room and a sound not unlike the loud ringing of a bell or a gong. A second after the sound had given its hollow echo, a flash of light erupted in the room and a nearly twenty foot tall man appeared. Red skin and a thick black beard, the giant’s eyes were like lumps of burning coal set in his sockets and they darted around the room, looking angrily and hungrily for anything alive as he hefted an enormous axe.
The fire giant roared something in his own language which none of the group understood and they quietly backed away from him as he looked around in vain for where they might be hiding.
“Hey Dumbass – over here – behind the door.” Inva’s voice echoed out to the giant from a sudden magic mouth that she conjured into place on one of the exit gates.
The giant roared and pounded on the door several times to no avail. Despite his prodigious strength, the door barely moved on its frame.
“Yeah sh*thead, I’m talking to you. Come get me behind here.” Inva’s voice echoed out again, seemingly from behind the door.
The giant bellowed again in rage, pounding on the door one last time in abject frustration before he turned to the column and its levers and began to pull them at random.
And then something happened. Inva’s magic mouth, for the briefest of moments, was snagged from her control, looked at where she stood invisibly and smiled as if it were amused by her actions.
“Someone noticed…” Ankita’s voice said inside the minds of the others.
The giant, ignorant of what had happened, yanked one of the levers down and suddenly one of the gates opened into an empty cell.
“Wrong one dumbass. Try again.” Inva said mockingly.
Another scream of rage and another lever pulled.
The next gate swung open into a long, dark passage where if Inva hadn’t been throwing her voice by magic, she would have been standing.
“Whoops. Wrong again.”
And then the giant pulled a more unfortunate lever. There was another ring of a large, hollow bell and another flash of light. This time something emerged inside the previously empty cell. Roughly the size of a large dog, a pinkish-purple brain on four squat legs and with a lashing tail like that of some monstrous rat scuttled out and towards the only creature in the room: the fire giant.
Without a moment’s hesitation the group ran past the giant and into the darkened passage as the intellect devourer pounced it. They ran some fifty feet down the corridor with the agonized screams of the giant fading into the distance before they stopped at the sudden cloying stench of rot.
Victor swore in elven and covered his nose with his sleeve. The others stopped abruptly as well and winced at the carrion wind that blew down the passage. Somewhere up ahead there was something foul and rotten.
The stench however did nothing to stop the advance of Marcus and Francesca. However what the stench didn’t do, an unseen glyph on the floor did. Both of the fighters were enveloped in a brilliant static flash from the discharging rune and the subsequent explosive blast.
“Way to go guys. How about I just let you check for any traps from now on? You seem to be doing fine on your own…” Inva said from somewhere in the shadows.
Marcus glared as he swallowed a quaff of a potion and handed the remainder to his vassal.
Victor sighed, “If you would please check for anything else down the hallway Inva we’d appreciate it.”
The tiefling ran a finger over the cleric’s chin as she passed him, flashing him a smirk as she walked past the two burned and stunned fighters.
Ten feet ahead, Inva found a second pattern of marks on the floor, traced in diamond dust, glowing brilliantly under the effects of a cantrip allowing her to see their dweomers. Deftly and with obvious practice she nullified the rune by smudging a specific portion of its complex pattern.
“Done.” She said as the progressed further down the hall till they reached the source of the foul smell.
The rot blackened and desiccated remains of at least one or two corpses were plastered upon the floor and the adjacent walls of the corridor. The bones were mostly crushed to powder by whatever it was that had killed them, but there was otherwise no clue what had done the deed. All eyes however turned to Inva.
She gave a cursory glance at the floor and found nothing outside of the gory splatters that coated the metallic surfaces. She passed it off as the past remnants of a fight or some spell’s effect on some berk. Then with a shrug she stepped forwards as a massive block of stone slammed down from the ceiling as she tripped its pressure plate.
Somewhere on the other side of the block of stone Inva softly snarled to herself for having missed the trap.
“Inva! You alive?!” Victor shouted as the air cleared of dust.
“…whoops…” came her only reply.
Of course the others gave her a deserved ribbing as they managed to squeeze past the side of the block of stone and then continued down the passage. For her part, the tiefling simply smirked and took the bemused commentary of her fellows in turn as she faded into the shadows with only the spade at the end of her tail flicking out of the gloom to announce her presence.
Soon enough the corridor sloped upwards and the emerged out into the source of the light and the blowing breeze. The cavern they entered was massive by almost any rationale, even containing its own local weather system. While it was still cut from the same dull gray metal as the rest of the tunnels and chambers, a white light erupted out like an artificial sun from nowhere in particular overhead and clouds dotted the upper reaches.
Velkyn squinted as his eyes adjusted to the sudden illumination, making him for a moment a scene of the stereotypical drow squinting at the light of a surface dawn. Though unlike a drow, the half-drow was over the squinting in a second or two, and of the group, only Inva seemed less than pleased at the fairly comfortable level of illumination.
The group stood at the top of a valley with a single road leading down through a forest of iron trees that erupted like living things from the cold metal of the valley floor. The path wound its way through the trees and then switchback up a mountain at the center of the valley. At the very top of the mountain there was a single tree and something else, though it was miles off from their location and they couldn’t make out much more detail without walking there.
They all glanced at one another tentatively before following the road through the valley. Though very obviously made or grown from rough iron, the treetops all seemed to blow gently in the wind. Then however it became obvious that it wasn’t wind, but that the trees were all moving, rustling with their proximity to the forest. Even more, the leaves, branches and thorns of the plants in the forest were razored.
“All we need now is razorvine to make this complete.” Inva said with a chuckle as the others nervously watched the movements of the forest clustering around them.
“Oh shut up.” Velkyn said with a smirk that bordered on a grin.
Over the next hour or two they slowly made their way through the moving, hungry forest and up the mountain. Near the start of the trail that wound its way up the iron slope they noticed an inscribed stone plate in the path. Further up they say another and then another. Ascending the mountain like the stepping-stones of titans were the inscribed stones.
The stones weren’t magical and there was no evidence of traps, though they made certain that Inva checked just in case. In sequence they read:
"I was a man, and I was condemned here..."
"And then I found a key"
“Finally…” Inva whispered harshly.
“Yeah, about damn time. It’s taken us hours just to get up here and we’re on a timetable.” Marcus grumbled.
"I was so very happy"
"And then I met another man, he was purple."
"And then the mind flayer ate my brain."
“Ouch…” Velkyn said. “There’s something we’ll probably run into eventually in here I hate to say.”
"And then I met this pretty lady who lived in a pond."
"But I wasn't shiny so she didn't like me. But she liked my key and so I gave it to her."
"I wasn't happy anymore."
"So I came back here. And here I am."
Standing on top of the mountain they glanced at the single dead tree that was tethered to the metallic soil at the edge of sheer precipice. A noose hung from the branches and the corpse of a man in haphazard clothing swung in the breeze, laughing insanely every few swings. At his feet the skeletal remains of a puppy snapped at his feet and gave a lifelike bark in response to the giggling, swinging corpse of the fool.
“Sh*t…” Velkyn said as they looked at the giggling corpse.
“Damnit.” Victor said as he didn’t even bother taking up his holy symbol. The corpse wasn’t a threat, it was a cruel joke played on them. Hours had passed and taken away from the limit they had to find the keys in, and there was no key here to be found. But they did have a clue at least.
“The other door. The one with the fey woman… sounds like he gave a key to her.” Ankita said as she tried to hide her disappointment in the long trek up the mountain for no purpose.
“But hell if there’s a mind flayer in here… damn.” Velkyn said. “That might be what the other door was hinting at, the one with the man and a shield warding off something.”
“Maybe. But let’s get moving.” Marcus said as he glanced and shook his head at the skeletal puppy still yapping blindly at the heels of the fool.
Clueless's illustration for the end of this update
Very spiffy
Inva stepped back from the conjured light and held up a copper coin between two fingers. “Let’s see how deep this room is…”
The tanar’ri-blooded tiefer tossed the coin and mentally counted out the seconds before she heard it strike a solid wall on the other side. Several hundred feet deep at the very least, but at least it was dark and that suited her just fine.
“What the hell are those?” Velkyn said as he squinted and shifted his sight into the darkvision spectrum.
Tangled within or hanging in the masses of chains were a trio of forms. Two of them were obviously corpses of humans, but the third was so encased in the chains that it was less certain as to any firm details.
Victor fingered his holy symbol as the third corpse twitched slightly beyond the rattling of the chains in the wind.
Ankita smiled and gestured her hand towards the chains that ensconced the figure and several seconds later they began to give off palpable warmth. The figure twitched more.
“What’d you do?” Marcus asked curiously as his brother continued to keep his holy symbol ready.
Ankita smiled and pointed at the twitching figure, “Just a spell to heat metal. Doesn’t last long but I can do it as many times as I want as long as I’m awake.”
As if to punctuate her statement the chains around the wrapped form flared up and began to glow like red-hot irons in a forge and the reaction was immediate. The being gave an infuriated snarl and swung itself backwards and away from the rapidly warming nest of hanging chains. The chains around its body seemed to latch onto those hanging behind it and swing it away like extensions of itself.
“Yeah, that would be a kyton. Lovely.” Inva said from where she stood at the dim margin of Ankita’s summoned light.
“Alright, what are Kytons vulnerable to?” Marcus asked.
Ankita answered, “They’re not resistant to much of anything, but they heal wounds unless the weapons are enchanted to at least a certain degree.”
Marcus and his cohort raised their weapons, joined soon by Victor’s vassal Garibaldi.
“Won’t be much of a problem I assure you.” Victor’s brother said as he raised a saber in one hand and a pistol in the other.
With the fighters in the front followed closely behind by the cleric and with the casters standing at the rear they tentatively advanced into the darkness. Somewhere beyond the range of their light they could hear the slink and rattle of chains moving independently from the soft sway imparted by the breeze.
As they passed the two dangling corpses they noticed another hanging corpse and a glimmer of movement at the edge of the light.
“There’s more than one thing moving back there. Probably two kytons instead of one.” Victor said.
Then the two kytons came rushing out of the darkness and at the same time the other corpses lurched into activity with pinpoints of reddish light suddenly erupting in their unliving sockets.
“Gaaaahh!” Velkyn shouted as one of the wights struck him a heavy blow on the shoulder, a sense of chilling cold pervaded the wound, and several of his more powerful spells drained from his memory like dreams that slipped away upon waking.
“Take the fiends!” Victor shouted as he turned to the undead threatening the spellcasters.
The two chain wrapped fiends swung into the light and lashed out at Marcus, Francesca and Garibaldi. They scored a few glancing blows but the fighters were heavily enough armored to ward off most of the damage.
Velkyn rolled away from immediate danger and hurriedly cast a spell to batter one of the wights with a trio of unerringly accurate magical bolts. A second later the same creature was burnt to a crisp by a glowing beam of light from Victor’s outstretched hand.
The fighters were having difficulty with the kytons, as it seemed to be that more than half of their blows that connected with the devils were simply negated by the beings’ innate resistance to damaging blows. They scored cuts and slashes on them but most of the damage simply sealed itself up in mere moments.
Another wight came shambling out of the darkness and Victor decided to end their threat as soon as possible. The cleric brandished his holy symbol and shouted out an invocation to his deity at the top of his lungs. A brilliant halo of sunlight surrounded him and enveloped the two snarling wights, leaving behind naught but ashes.
Free from the risk of the undead, Ankita whispered an incantation and summoned a rolling sphere of flame onto one of the fiends as Marcus cocked his pistol and aimed it for the head of the other. The sphere missed its target, but a hellish shriek of pain that rose over the loud and sudden crack of the pistol made it clear even before the smoke cleared that Marcus hadn’t missed his target.
Several more flurries of blows from the fighters and Inva’s sword suddenly bursting from the throat of one of the two kytons and the fight was over. The bodies of the fiends began to slowly burn into piles of chains and foul-smelling ashes and there was little left of the undead as it was.
Velkyn winced at the lingering chill that had crept into his bones from the earlier attack as he looked over towards Victor and then down at the smoldering remains of the wights. “What god did you say you worshipped?”
“The right god!” Victor said with a triumphant smile and a single eyebrow raised.
Velkyn and Ankita chuckled.
“Whatever…” Inva said to herself as once again she slunk off into the shadows with a grin.
A brief survey of the remains turned up little besides a scattering of gold and silver coins; not much but a minimal reward for their troubles they all figured, even if it didn’t really bring them any closer to escape or even an explanation of what had brought them to their present circumstance. Inva retrieved her bent copper piece that she’d tossed across the room earlier and then cautiously glanced down the passageway that led out of the room.
“Seems clear to me. Looks like it runs about forty feet and hits another room.” Velkyn said, more for Francesca, Garibaldi, and Ankita’s benefit than not since they, as humans, had neither the darkvision of the half-drow and the tieflings, or the low light vision of the elf. Of course, Ankita was anything but, and had better vision in the dark than any of them save perhaps Inva who seemed to thrive in the shadows like she was a part of them. But, no need to tell the others anything more than they knew unless it was needed; it might not be taken well.
The room was made of the same rough metal as everything else, though the floor was polished by repeated foot traffic more than before. Three metal doors blocked exit from the chamber and a solid metal column stood provocatively in the center. Almost unnoticed till they had entered the room were a number of small piles of rocks and gravel.
“Hold on…” Ankita said as she noticed the gravel.
Inva slipped out of the shadows at the warning and whispered a few words under her breath just as Ankita did the same.
They glanced warily at the metal column that stood from floor to ceiling in the very center of the room. It was pentagonal in shape and unadorned except for two short levers that graced identical slots on each of the five faces. A soft mechanical whirring emanated from its interior, and as they listened to it they could hear a regular pattern to it, but it gave little clue regarding the ten levers.
“Three doors and ten levers. This isn’t going to be pleasant if anything so far has been an indication. There’s today’s lesson in the obvious.” Velkyn said sarcastically as he examined the base of the column.
Marcus and his cohort were both busily checking the three doors that led out of the room, but outside of a bit of rust on each of them they could discern little. The doors were thick enough to prevent any determination of how deep their other sides might be, either room, wall, or passage.
Inva was kneeling on the floor, tapping a claw upon a thin stain on the ground. She twitched her tail and traced up the column to where the spray of liquid that caused the stain would have originated. Sure enough she found a small, almost undetectable pinhole in the metal surface. Another circuit around the column and she was certain that none of the other faces had such a feature.
The tiefling tapped the face of the column with the spade at the tip of her tail. The others turned at the hollow clang.
“One of the two levers here spits out some sort of liquid, either a trap or a water source. I can’t tell from the stain on the floor which it might be. Anyone care to find out?”
Victor held out an empty glass vial, the remnants of a quaffed healing potion from the fight earlier. “At the least we can trap some of it here and then make a decision.”
“Fair enough.” Inva said as Victor took the vial and held it over the pinhole.
A second later as the others braced themselves Velkyn pulled one of the levers and a stream of colorless liquid filled the vial.
“It’s… it’s a healing potion of some sort.” Victor said as he sniffed at the liquid.
“There’s an irony. I was expecting acid.” Ankita said.
They pulled the lever a second time, using another empty vial, but the second time the amount of liquid was only half what it was the first time. They shrugged and passed it off as perhaps some internal reservoir needing time to refill. And so, not wishing to tempt fate on a third try with the same lever, they picked another at random.
Marcus was about to pull another lever before Velkyn stopped him.
“Wait a second. If anything is behind those doors when they open, why don’t we all stay invisible? I’ve got enough charges on the wand, at least for the moment.” The half-drow said as he held up the wand. “Not cheap, but it’s better than being dead.”
“Work’s for me, and I can pull the lever without being close to it: Telekinesis.” Ankita said as Velkyn tapped her with the wand.
And so with all of them invisible, Ankita reached out with a tug of invisible force and pulled another of the levers.
There was a sudden brimstone smell that flooded the room and a sound not unlike the loud ringing of a bell or a gong. A second after the sound had given its hollow echo, a flash of light erupted in the room and a nearly twenty foot tall man appeared. Red skin and a thick black beard, the giant’s eyes were like lumps of burning coal set in his sockets and they darted around the room, looking angrily and hungrily for anything alive as he hefted an enormous axe.
The fire giant roared something in his own language which none of the group understood and they quietly backed away from him as he looked around in vain for where they might be hiding.
“Hey Dumbass – over here – behind the door.” Inva’s voice echoed out to the giant from a sudden magic mouth that she conjured into place on one of the exit gates.
The giant roared and pounded on the door several times to no avail. Despite his prodigious strength, the door barely moved on its frame.
“Yeah sh*thead, I’m talking to you. Come get me behind here.” Inva’s voice echoed out again, seemingly from behind the door.
The giant bellowed again in rage, pounding on the door one last time in abject frustration before he turned to the column and its levers and began to pull them at random.
And then something happened. Inva’s magic mouth, for the briefest of moments, was snagged from her control, looked at where she stood invisibly and smiled as if it were amused by her actions.
“Someone noticed…” Ankita’s voice said inside the minds of the others.
The giant, ignorant of what had happened, yanked one of the levers down and suddenly one of the gates opened into an empty cell.
“Wrong one dumbass. Try again.” Inva said mockingly.
Another scream of rage and another lever pulled.
The next gate swung open into a long, dark passage where if Inva hadn’t been throwing her voice by magic, she would have been standing.
“Whoops. Wrong again.”
And then the giant pulled a more unfortunate lever. There was another ring of a large, hollow bell and another flash of light. This time something emerged inside the previously empty cell. Roughly the size of a large dog, a pinkish-purple brain on four squat legs and with a lashing tail like that of some monstrous rat scuttled out and towards the only creature in the room: the fire giant.
Without a moment’s hesitation the group ran past the giant and into the darkened passage as the intellect devourer pounced it. They ran some fifty feet down the corridor with the agonized screams of the giant fading into the distance before they stopped at the sudden cloying stench of rot.
Victor swore in elven and covered his nose with his sleeve. The others stopped abruptly as well and winced at the carrion wind that blew down the passage. Somewhere up ahead there was something foul and rotten.
The stench however did nothing to stop the advance of Marcus and Francesca. However what the stench didn’t do, an unseen glyph on the floor did. Both of the fighters were enveloped in a brilliant static flash from the discharging rune and the subsequent explosive blast.
“Way to go guys. How about I just let you check for any traps from now on? You seem to be doing fine on your own…” Inva said from somewhere in the shadows.
Marcus glared as he swallowed a quaff of a potion and handed the remainder to his vassal.
Victor sighed, “If you would please check for anything else down the hallway Inva we’d appreciate it.”
The tiefling ran a finger over the cleric’s chin as she passed him, flashing him a smirk as she walked past the two burned and stunned fighters.
Ten feet ahead, Inva found a second pattern of marks on the floor, traced in diamond dust, glowing brilliantly under the effects of a cantrip allowing her to see their dweomers. Deftly and with obvious practice she nullified the rune by smudging a specific portion of its complex pattern.
“Done.” She said as the progressed further down the hall till they reached the source of the foul smell.
The rot blackened and desiccated remains of at least one or two corpses were plastered upon the floor and the adjacent walls of the corridor. The bones were mostly crushed to powder by whatever it was that had killed them, but there was otherwise no clue what had done the deed. All eyes however turned to Inva.
She gave a cursory glance at the floor and found nothing outside of the gory splatters that coated the metallic surfaces. She passed it off as the past remnants of a fight or some spell’s effect on some berk. Then with a shrug she stepped forwards as a massive block of stone slammed down from the ceiling as she tripped its pressure plate.
Somewhere on the other side of the block of stone Inva softly snarled to herself for having missed the trap.
“Inva! You alive?!” Victor shouted as the air cleared of dust.
“…whoops…” came her only reply.
Of course the others gave her a deserved ribbing as they managed to squeeze past the side of the block of stone and then continued down the passage. For her part, the tiefling simply smirked and took the bemused commentary of her fellows in turn as she faded into the shadows with only the spade at the end of her tail flicking out of the gloom to announce her presence.
Soon enough the corridor sloped upwards and the emerged out into the source of the light and the blowing breeze. The cavern they entered was massive by almost any rationale, even containing its own local weather system. While it was still cut from the same dull gray metal as the rest of the tunnels and chambers, a white light erupted out like an artificial sun from nowhere in particular overhead and clouds dotted the upper reaches.
Velkyn squinted as his eyes adjusted to the sudden illumination, making him for a moment a scene of the stereotypical drow squinting at the light of a surface dawn. Though unlike a drow, the half-drow was over the squinting in a second or two, and of the group, only Inva seemed less than pleased at the fairly comfortable level of illumination.
The group stood at the top of a valley with a single road leading down through a forest of iron trees that erupted like living things from the cold metal of the valley floor. The path wound its way through the trees and then switchback up a mountain at the center of the valley. At the very top of the mountain there was a single tree and something else, though it was miles off from their location and they couldn’t make out much more detail without walking there.
They all glanced at one another tentatively before following the road through the valley. Though very obviously made or grown from rough iron, the treetops all seemed to blow gently in the wind. Then however it became obvious that it wasn’t wind, but that the trees were all moving, rustling with their proximity to the forest. Even more, the leaves, branches and thorns of the plants in the forest were razored.
“All we need now is razorvine to make this complete.” Inva said with a chuckle as the others nervously watched the movements of the forest clustering around them.
“Oh shut up.” Velkyn said with a smirk that bordered on a grin.
Over the next hour or two they slowly made their way through the moving, hungry forest and up the mountain. Near the start of the trail that wound its way up the iron slope they noticed an inscribed stone plate in the path. Further up they say another and then another. Ascending the mountain like the stepping-stones of titans were the inscribed stones.
The stones weren’t magical and there was no evidence of traps, though they made certain that Inva checked just in case. In sequence they read:
"I was a man, and I was condemned here..."
"And then I found a key"
“Finally…” Inva whispered harshly.
“Yeah, about damn time. It’s taken us hours just to get up here and we’re on a timetable.” Marcus grumbled.
"I was so very happy"
"And then I met another man, he was purple."
"And then the mind flayer ate my brain."
“Ouch…” Velkyn said. “There’s something we’ll probably run into eventually in here I hate to say.”
"And then I met this pretty lady who lived in a pond."
"But I wasn't shiny so she didn't like me. But she liked my key and so I gave it to her."
"I wasn't happy anymore."
"So I came back here. And here I am."
Standing on top of the mountain they glanced at the single dead tree that was tethered to the metallic soil at the edge of sheer precipice. A noose hung from the branches and the corpse of a man in haphazard clothing swung in the breeze, laughing insanely every few swings. At his feet the skeletal remains of a puppy snapped at his feet and gave a lifelike bark in response to the giggling, swinging corpse of the fool.
“Sh*t…” Velkyn said as they looked at the giggling corpse.
“Damnit.” Victor said as he didn’t even bother taking up his holy symbol. The corpse wasn’t a threat, it was a cruel joke played on them. Hours had passed and taken away from the limit they had to find the keys in, and there was no key here to be found. But they did have a clue at least.
“The other door. The one with the fey woman… sounds like he gave a key to her.” Ankita said as she tried to hide her disappointment in the long trek up the mountain for no purpose.
“But hell if there’s a mind flayer in here… damn.” Velkyn said. “That might be what the other door was hinting at, the one with the man and a shield warding off something.”
“Maybe. But let’s get moving.” Marcus said as he glanced and shook his head at the skeletal puppy still yapping blindly at the heels of the fool.
***
Clueless's illustration for the end of this update
Very spiffy
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Shemeska
Adventurer
Gez said:Two updates on the same day! That's cruel, I got all confused between the two complexes after having to take a break from the computer...
*chuckle*
It'll probably be two updates next week as well since I'm not running a game this weekend because of players taking exams next week and I've got research to do in the meantime.
Spider_Jerusalem
Explorer
Kytons and Mindflayers. I imagine someone gave you my 'what to include in a SH to make him read it' portfolio.
I'm sorry to say that I never read the first planescape SH (but always wanted to, but too much water under the bridge to catch up. or something
). I'm loving this so far - reminding me of that film Cube - which is a good thing.
Well, keep up the good work and looking (from behind the sofa, covering my eyes
) forward to the next update.
Spider.
I'm sorry to say that I never read the first planescape SH (but always wanted to, but too much water under the bridge to catch up. or something
). I'm loving this so far - reminding me of that film Cube - which is a good thing. Well, keep up the good work and looking (from behind the sofa, covering my eyes
) forward to the next update.Spider.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Spider_Jerusalem said:Kytons and Mindflayers. I imagine someone gave you my 'what to include in a SH to make him read it' portfolio.
I'm sorry to say that I never read the first planescape SH (but always wanted to, but too much water under the bridge to catch up. or something
I'm happy that you're enjoying it! I've got the next update half written or so for next week already.
It's not too late. It's several hundred updates and two years in material behind before that one's all said and done. You've got plenty of time. Plus, as this 2nd storyhour progresses, I have a firm feeling that the PCs may do stuff that intertwines with relics of the plot(s) of the 1st storyhour. It's not intended on my part, but the fallout from that campaign was rather large and it'll be hard to not stumble into it at some point. So the 1st storyhour may eventually fill in some background details. However this 1st plot arc, and the 2nd plot arc that I'm current in the process of running IRL, they're independant of the 1st storyhour, and so is the 3rd plot most likely.
And as for 'Cube', I watched all 3 Cube movies (And the Exorcist prequel) the weekend before planning this all out, so there's some background inspiration at least for the initial 'you wake up'. Though I'm taking as much inspiration from a previous DM of mine (who introduced me to Planescape) that involved the PCs waking up abruptly in a slave train in the Outlands without any memories of how they got there.
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